Landscape defines a culture by creating the environment that a society becomes familiar with. The puritan’s centered their villages around spirituality and community, the Pueblo’s formed theirs around nature and community, and today American society builds its landscape around function and efficiency. At least this is the argument of Rina Sentzell. Her article also implies that people insert or find their familiar landscape in alien environments. As American’s we build schools and houses out of processed materials in replace of nature, while the Pueblo children seek nature in our structure. Concrete may be cold and harsh to the Pueblos, but the materials we construct our homes from still, in essence, come from nature.
Swentzel is overly sentimental about the idea of people being in tune with a land that is “honored” and left “domesticated.” She seems to ignore the reality that the Pueblo clearly dominated their environment. They built homes and planted fields—they had the foundations of an industrious society. I argue that environment creates the limitations of a society, but that the landscape is the product of humans trying to domesticate that environment. Whether through close interaction with nature, or God, or technology, humans are all trying to bring order to their surroundings.
–I really need to work on my flow, but it's too late for a re-write
No comments:
Post a Comment